[Fwd: Re: [Clipart] OO.o page about OCAL]

[michael meeks]

On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 13:02 -0700, Jon Phillips wrote:
> > > Who on this list is still working with Open Office? I remember in the
> > > beginning there were a bunch of ppl, but now maybe OO.o developers have
> > > deserted us ;)

	And I just joined :-)

> Yes, I'm very interested in boosting the visibility of OCAL along with
> OO.o. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. The OO.o project has
> so many entry points and people I don't even know where to get started
> in pushing for more integration.

	Um - most of the people in the 'OO.o community' don't actually do much
at least AFAICS :-)

> I guess I see it as this:
> 
>     1.) OO.o needs SVG import/export

	That is not a trivial task unfortunately.

>     2.) OO.o needs OCAL browser that browses SVG and not PNG
>         * This is under Tools > Gallery in OO.o, right?

	Well - that's trivial in fact once you solve the minor SVG importing
issue above ;-) and IMHO you're wrong :-) OO.o (for good reason) uses a
single, aggregated bitmap/thumbnail cache for clipart - and I think
that's the only sane way to make clipart browsing efficient and
performant. Scattering files across the disk and mandating they all need
to be read regularly is just a really silly idea [ cf. .desktop files].

>     3.) OO.o needs better promotion of Open Clip Art Library (web,etc)

	Well - so; we have to render all the clip-art stuff to bitmaps; not
just for the preview, but for in-document use too.

	Petr & I wrote a tool to generate galleries from the open-clipart
archives without requiring manual click/drag to do this - and that will
(hopefully) one-day go 'up-stream'.

	The relevant bug is:

		http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=49174

	As normal nothing much is happening wrt. getting this up-stream. 

	So far, those tools are build/used as part of ooo-build - so there
should be little problem packaging openclipart for OO.o on Novell
distros, Debian, Mdk, etc. Unfortunately RedHat have decided not to use
ooo-build, so I guess they are likely to do something different there.

> * We are already providing a huge resource to the standard Open Office
> user, but also how can we promote Open Office more? I would ask the same
> thing of other affiliate projects?

	Here is what I want from the openclipart project (and perhaps you have
this already):

	* A specification for your clip-art & it's meta-data
	* A sketch of the requirements I'd want to see satisfied there:
		a) internationalization - without cramming all 
		   translations into the same file [ size constraints ]
		b) png thumbnails of the svg icons aggregated into a 
		   single file
		c) MIME/type of each piece of clip-art
		d) somethign easily parseable - ie. no crazy XML 
		   css/xslt crud. Flat text appreciated ;-)

	So - some of this we have already I see eg.

$> cat office/note_with_pin_nicu_bucul_02.txt 
Title:    note with pin
Author:   Nicu Buculei
License:  Public Domain
Keywords: office

	Something like this in an aggregate description file would be fine. I
guess; the description file should (ideally) be a cache - with a tool
that can re-generate that when new clipart is installed; a
cache-per-directory would prolly be sufficient.

	The rational behind b) is that scattering .png files all across the
disk is appallingly bad news wrt. seek time, not to mention wasted slack
disk space; [ same rational for the single aggregated description file
for all clipart in a given directory ].

	Perhaps a .zip based scheme for all the data might work quite nicely.

	Of course - having no translation scheme currently is also rather a
problem for i18n ;-)

	Anyhow - here's the punch line: if you guys can come up with a
consistent, sensible published specification that addresses these
requirements; I'm more than happy to dedicate the resources to hacking
the (quite simple anyway) OO.o gallery code into shape to use them :-)

	How does that sound ?

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot